On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, Volume 2

Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library #29

by Maximus the Confessor, Nicholas Constas (Translator)

Maximos the Confessor (580–662) occupies a unique position in the history of Byzantine philosophy, theology, and spirituality. His profound spiritual experiences and penetrating theological vision found complex and often astonishing expression in his unparalleled command of Greek philosophy, making him one of the most challenging and original Christian thinkers of all time. So thoroughly did his thought come to influence the Byzantine theological tradition that it is impossible to trace the subsequent history of Orthodox Christianity without knowledge of his work. The Ambigua (or “Book of Difficulties”) is Maximos’s greatest philosophical and doctrinal work, in which his daring originality, prodigious talent for speculative thinking, and analytical acumen are on lavish display. In the Ambigua, a broad range of theological topics—cosmology, anthropology, the philosophy of mind and language, allegory, asceticism, and metaphysics—are transformed in a synthesis of Aristotelian logic, Platonic metaphysics, Stoic psychology, and the arithmetical philosophy of a revived Pythagoreanism. The result is a labyrinthine map of the mind’s journey to God that figured prominently in the Neoplatonic revival of the Komnenian Renaissance and the Hesychast Controversies of the Late Byzantine period.

This remarkable work has never before been available in a critically-based edition or English translation.

Genres: Theology, Philosophy, Christianity, Church History

388 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 634

About the author

Maximus the Confessor (Greek: Μάξιμος ὁ Ὁμολογητής) also known as Maximus the Theologian and Maximus of Constantinople (c. 580 – 13 August 662) was a Christian monk, theologian, and scholar.

In his early life, Maximus was a civil servant, and an aide to the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius. However, he gave up this life in the political sphere to enter into the monastic life. Maximus had studied diverse schools of philosophy, and certainly what was common for his time, the Platonic dialogues, the works of Aristotle, and numerous later Platonic commentators on Aristotle and Plato, like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus. When one of his friends began espousing the Christological position known as Monothelitism, Maximus was drawn into the controversy, in which he supported an interpretation of the Chalcedonian formula on the basis of which it was asserted that Jesus had both a human and a divine will. Maximus is venerated in both Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity. His Christological positions eventually resulted in the mutilation of his tongue and right hand, after which he was exiled and died on August 13, 662 in Tsageri, Georgia. However, his theology was upheld by the Third Council of Constantinople and he was venerated as a saint soon after his death. He is almost unique among saints in that he has two feast days: the 13th of August and the 21st of January. His title of Confessor means that he suffered for the Christian faith, but was not directly martyred. The Life of the Virgin is commonly, albeit mistakenly, attributed to him, and is considered to be one of the earliest complete biographies of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Reviews

[Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Then, by His ascension into heaven, it is obvious that He united heaven and earth, for He entered heaven with His earthly body, which is of the same nature and consubstantial with ours, and showed that, according to its more universal principle, all sensible nature is one, and thus He obscured in Himself the property of division that had cut it in two. Then, in addition to this, having passed with His soul and body, that is, with the whole of our nature, through all the divine and intelligible orders of heaven, He united sensible things with intelligible things, displaying in Himself the fact that the convergence of the entire creation toward unity
was absolutely indivisible and beyond all fracture, in accordance with its most primal and most universal principle.”

“The ‘Gospel’ is the higher principle concerning the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is the state of rest that is pure of all matter and its attendant fantasies.”

An excellent second volume of The Ambigua as translated by Constas. Both volumes were so readable and well done, even if Maximus’s own writing and theologizing can be very dense and even a little clunky at times. Key issues that emerge from the Confessor’s discussions on difficult passages in Gregory of Nazianzus include the Trinity, Christology, knowledge of God and deification of man, as well as a discussion of the soul and the body. The final few Ambigua get super random and there is even some discussion on numerology, but according to the notes on the text, this was Maximus’s way of showing the goodness of arithmetic as an aspect of creation. Maximus’s work is so dense and unique that I cannot help but want to keep going back for more to fully unravel what he is trying to do in his writings. I see one of the foremost thinkers of the patristic period, and a thinker who has unfortunately been neglected by the Protestant church, every time I read one of his texts. Maximus lays a lot of stress on human effort and striving to attain knowledge of divine realities, but he never does this in an arrogant or “holier than thou” manner. In fact, Maximus is extremely humble and sees himself as on this journey to a knowledge of the principles of things and divination by grace by the power of God.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Volume 2...check out my review of Volume 1 if interested.

[Lukas Stock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fully Maxpilled.

[Matthew Picchietti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vol. 2, like vol. 1, was more than a bit beyond my brain. The final line is a banger though and worth the slog of the rest of it.